Defeating Passive Eavesdropping with Quantum Illumination

Quantum illumination permits Alice and Bob to communicate at 50 Mbit/s over 50 km of low-loss fiber with error probability less than 10^(-6) while the optimum passive eavesdropper's error probability must exceed 0.28.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure; new version corrects a significant typographical erro

Continuous-variable dense coding by optomechanical cavities

In this paper, we show how continuous-variable dense coding can be implemented using entangled light generated from a membrane-in-the-middle geometry. The mechanical resonator is assumed to be a high reflectivity membrane hung inside a high quality factor cavity. We show that the mechanical resonator is able to generate an amount of entanglement between the optical modes at the output of the cavity, which is strong enough to approach the capacity of quantum dense coding at small photon numbers. The suboptimal rate reachable by our optomechanical protocol is high enough to outperform the classical capacity of the noiseless quantum channel

All-optical generation of states for "Encoding a qubit in an oscillator"

Both discrete and continuous systems can be used to encode quantum information. Most quantum computation schemes propose encoding qubits in two-level systems, such as a two-level atom or an electron spin. Others exploit the use of an infinite-dimensional system, such as a harmonic oscillator. In "Encoding a qubit in an oscillator" [Phys. Rev. A 64 012310 (2001)], Gottesman, Kitaev, and Preskill (GKP) combined these approaches when they proposed a fault-tolerant quantum computation scheme in which a qubit is encoded in the continuous position and momentum degrees of freedom of an oscillator. One advantage of this scheme is that it can be performed by use of relatively simple linear optical devices, squeezing, and homodyne detection. However, we lack a practical method to prepare the initial GKP states. Here we propose the generation of an approximate GKP state by using superpositions of optical coherent states (sometimes called "Schr\"odinger cat states"), squeezing, linear optical devices, and homodyne detection.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Optics Letter